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Our subject, Jimmy, has been using the internet for the past four years. He got started at a friend's house -- they were young, bored, and out of money. Jimmy was once an arcade jockey, spending long hours in noisy recreational facilities.
"Jump, man! That barrel's rolling straight at you!" his best friend would shout.
"I am jumping!"
But alas, he would fall to a gruesome death, his on-screen representation a mess of pixels, half smashed into the ground.
They would go home, pockets empty, hearts broken, returning once more to the quiet comfort of their own homes. Jimmy knew a little about the strange box his parents called the computer -- he knew how to start it, how to load Minesweeper, and how to press the CTRL, ALT, and DELETE buttons simultaneously.
But somehow, Jimmy lost interest in the arcade. He lost interest in a lot of things, including, but not limited to healthy eating, kickball, homework, and recreational reading. In short, he was becoming a teenager.
He began spending more and more time at friend's houses or the school, sitting, waiting for the next screen to load. It was a drug, of sorts. It didn't give him lung cancer, though, and that's all his parents cared about.
Jimmy is not an unusual case. He spends three to four hours on the computer every night, chatting with friends from school or reading about the latest game from iD.
Our subject, Jimmy, has been using the internet for the past four years. He got started at a friend's house -- they were young, bored, and out of money. Jimmy was once an arcade jockey, spending long hours in noisy recreational facilities.
"Jump, man! That barrel's rolling straight at...